Ryan McCuaig

Links

HUMAN_FALLBACK | Issue 44 | n+1 | Laura Preston - A wonderfully-written memoir of time spent being behind the curtain of a Potemkin AI.
Why Clojure? - An overview of what makes it a pleasure to work in.

Situated Software - Re-reading Clay Shirky articles I first read before the Facebook era just hurts. I hear a Ron Howard Arrested Development Narrator voice in the back of my head saying, "But unfortunately, Facebook."
An app can be a home-cooked meal - If “learn to code” were meant the same way as “learn to cook.”

You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism - “You can discourse and quote-dunk and fact-check until you’re blue in the face, but at a certain point, you have to stop and decide what truth you believe in. The internet has conditioned us to constantly seek new information, as if becoming a sponge of bad news will eventually yield the final piece of a puzzle. But there is also such a thing as having _enough_ information.”

Quick Post – Multiple Shadow-CLJS builds at the same runtime – Maurício Szabo - A neat little hack to run shadow-cljs against two builds.

CodeCharta - Codebases visualized as architectural models seems very much like my jam.
A Rant about "Technology" - “Technology is the active human interface with the material world. But the word is consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialised technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human resources. This is not an acceptable use of the word.”

Algebraic Effects(-ish Things) in Clojure - lilac.town - An exploration of what an algebraic effect system might look like in Clojure.
Case Study ⸺ Tracing Command Chains through Time and Location - Using Datomic to map chains of command in the Myanmar military, because it’s well-suited to tracking shifting graphs over time. Surfacing a “claim” about someone commanding someone else as a reified thing in the data model lets them track the provenance of the derived graph in an interesting way.

JAR on 'Object-Oriented' - "Because OO is a moving target, OO zealots will choose some subset of this menu by whim and then use it to try to convince you that you are a loser."
In defense of blub studies | benkuhn.net - "So I always feel a little bit embarrassed and boring when I instead suggest going really deep on what you already know: your main programming language, web framework, object-relational mapper, UI library, version control system, database, Unix tools, etc. It’s not shiny or esoteric, but for me, building a detailed mental model of those (and how they compare to alternatives) might be the learning that’s contributed most to my effectiveness as an engineer."

I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps, and I can’t stop - I enjoy reading about this kind of thing, then get annoyed that this Filemaker-1998ish kind of itch-scratching is so janky and provisional and snuck into the free tier.

Ghostty - Ghostty came out yesterday, if you're into terminal emulators.
filipesilva/datomic-pro-sqlite - Datomic is so abstract on the storage end that it took me a long time to figure out how to ... store stuff. Thus, I am really liking this docker image for quickly setting up a transactor that uses sqlite. (For low to medium write volumes this seems fine, since architecturally nothing is competing with the transactor for writes anyway.